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Archive for 2012

Sicily’s Mount Etna is the largest active volcano in Europe and the most well-known. Yesterday it burst forth with quite a fireworks display overnight.
The eruption wasn’t as strong as previous bursts, but it lasted for a longer period of time than previous ones.

Autodesk Labs has just released Interactive Terrain Shaping for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012. This technology preview provides users with a workflow for developing grading proposals in Civil 3D 2012. Users will be able to interactively explore and create new conceptual grading plans.

John Snow created a map of a cholera outbreak in the district of Soho, London in 1854, which helped to convince authorities that the disease was caused by water ( in particular, it originated from one pump in Broad Street). The CartoDB platform allows you to map data and develop location aware applications very easily. This example of John Snow’s Cholera Map of London presented with CartoDB demonstrates how CartoDB can quickly combine different data types, then display them on a map.

The Denver area has become a center of satellite imagery providers in recent years. Proposed steep cuts in the U.S. Department of Defense budget could affect satellite-imagery providers DigitalGlobe, headquartered in Longmont, and GeoEye,based in Virginia with a processing and operations center in Thornton. Combined, the companies have about 1,200 employees.

This satellite image made available Sept. 26, 2009, by DigitalGlobe shows the suspected Iranian nuclear facility of Fordo near the holy Shiite city of Qom, where Iran is has begun enriching uranium, according to the U.N. atomic watchdog group, the International Atomic Energy Agency. (AFP/Getty Images file)

Mladen Stojic, vice president Geospatial, Intergraph, talked about their new Live Link product which integrates Intergraph GeoMedia objects into ERDAS IMAGINE. Intergraph is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hexagon acquired in 2011. What this product offers is what customers have been asking for – an integrated approach to desktop workflows, combining the desktop GIS capability of GeoMedia integrated with the raster remote sensing and image processing capabilities of ERDAS IMAGINE.

Social Media and Authoritative Citizen Data
Crowdsourced data, initially met with skepticism and concern by the geospatial community, is now going mainstream. GIS practitioners have long been the keepers of “authoritative” data, and are now beginning to take crowdsourced data very seriously. This is in large part due to the tremendous utility of crowdsourced data we’ve seen during responses to recent disasters. Crowdsourced data enriches GIS, and Esri is constantly looking at how our users can use, manage, interpret, and incorporate it into their work.

The Cloud
With the advent of cloud computing as a new platform, geospatial applications in the cloud are driving a powerful new modality for GIS. With it, there is an opportunity to reinvent the way the GIS application is built and consumed, as well as influence the discovery and availability of spatial data and geospatial analyses.

Cloud computing provides the potential for access to and publication of dynamic data. This includes the consumption of real-time information for analyses and modeling, which can then be leveraged in applications that serve multiple purposes and audiences. Esri is seeing this more with disaster response operations that are standing up mission-critical geospatial applications hosted in the cloud. With access to seemingly unlimited compute capacity using cloud infrastructures, analytical calculations can be performed in a fraction of the time as traditional processes, which may potentially offer more economic viability as a result of the economies of scale that the cloud affords.
This may seem only attractive to small- to medium-sized businesses, educational institutions, non-profits, and startups. But as cloud computing moves increasingly into mainstream operations for business, the potential for cloud-hosted content and cloud-delivered content is becoming a significant reality for organizations, regardless of size. For a geospatial technologist, cloud GIS can ideally mean that data is always available, always accessible. For the mobile worker, the cloud offers an expansive field to speed workflow productivity and collaboration. Shared data and applications in the cloud can be immediately accessed to discover, view, edit, save changes and invoke geoprocessing functions for on-demand results.

Esri recognizes the opportunities that cloud computing can afford the geospatial professional and technologist. As such, we intend to continue to invest significantly in research and development of cloud-based solutions and services across multiple vendors to satisfy the requests by the geospatial community, and to foster growth of GIS into industries and within communities that may have not been cultivated as yet.

It is important to underscore that our current attention to the cloud does not forego interest and investment in on-premises desktops, servers and mobile applications. Rather, the cloud is another enabling platform to help complement and augment an organization’s sales, marketing, and technology portfolio capabilities.

Business Intelligence and Analytics
Commercial/business applications of GIS have long lagged behind more traditional GIS applications such as planning, government, and environment. But we are starting to see GIS reach much deeper into the business arena due to the focus on integration of GIS with enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI), data warehousing, and enterprise content management (ECM) applications. The majority of these integrated applications let end users work either in their business application environment or the GIS environment, so they are not disruptive to existing enterprise workflows.

Esri’s approach in this arena has been to partner with companies who have deep expertise in their respective BI, ERP, and ECM environments. We also recently acquired SpotOn Systems, a company that brings interactive mapping to IBM Cognos business intelligence applications. By making it easier to unite Esri’s spatial analytics, data, and maps with IBM Cognos BI, we think that this acquisition provides business users of GIS with the analytic element that has long been missing.

Scholars are having trouble measuring the world’s largest cities – largely because the terms the cities are measured by differ from place to place. They have come up with a total of 30 largest cities in the world.

Richard Greene, associate professor of geography at Northern Illinois University in the United States, says even the most authoritative list, from the UN, “compares apples with pears”.

For those who have made any changes to the default raster type, you will probably want to save your changes. This way you can re-use your custom raster type if you want to load additional raster data with the same properties and functions.
To save your custom raster type, click on the General tab. At the bottom of this tab, you will see a Save As button. Click the Save As button, and save it in the location where you keep all your custom raster types.

Trimble Navigation Limited (TRMB) reported that its fourth-quarter GAAP net income attributable to the company was $29.40, down from $36.56 million in the same quarter last year. Earnings per share in the fourth quarter of 2011 were $0.23 as compared to diluted earnings per share of $0.29 in the fourth quarter of 2010.